Red Pepper Burns

by Grace S. Richmond

“He's right enough there,” was what Burns murmured to himself as he caught the elevator in the great building in which Buller's office was a crowded corner. “I may come down in just that style. But better that than any more of this dead level of suspense. I don't think I could stand that one more day.”

He and Johnny Caruthers whirled home in the Imp to find Burns's village office as crowded as Buller's city one. It was late before he could get his dinner, and after it he was kept busy turning calls over to other men. It was the usual experience to have work pile up during the last hours, as if Fate were against his breaking his chains and meant to tie him hand and foot.

“I'm going to get out of this right now,” he announced suddenly to Miss Mathewson an hour before train time, as he turned away from a siege over the telephone with one hysterical lady who felt that her life depended upon his remaining to see her through an attack of indigestion. “If I don't, something will come in that will pull hard to keep me home, and I'm not going to be kept. I'll trust you not to look me up for the next hour, for I'll not tell you where I'm going, and you can't guess, you know. Good-bye. Be a good girl.”

He wrung her hand, looking at her with that warmth of friendliness which he was accustomed, when in the mood, to bestow on her, recognizing how invaluable she was to him, and never once recking what it meant to her to be so closely associated with him. She answered in her usual quiet way, wishing him a safe journey and bidding him be very careful of the arm, no longer protected except by the silken sign that injury had been done.

“In a crowd, you know, they won't notice the sling,” she warned him.

“Won't they? Well, if my trusty left can't protect my battered right I've forgotten my boxing tricks. Don't be anxious about that, little friend. See that Amy Mathewson has a good time in my absence, will you? She's looking just a bit worn, to me.”

She smiled, but her eyes did not meet his: she dared not let them. With all his kindness to her he did not often speak with the real affection which was in his voice now. She understood that he was, for some reason, keyed high over his prospective journey even higher than he had been ten days before when on the point of leaving. And she knew well enough where he was going, though he had not told her. It would have taken thirty-six hours to go to Washington, spend a brief time there and return. It was going to take five days to go to South Carolina, remain long enough to transact his business—was it business?—and come back. And there had been no more attempts to write letters by way of an amanuensis. The affection for his assistant in his manner to her was genuine, she did not doubt that, but it did not deceive her for a moment. So, she did not let her eyes meet his. They rested, instead, on the scarfpin which Buller had termed a “peach,” but they did not see it. She could not remember when it had been so hard to maintain that quiet control of herself which had long since made her employer cease to reckon with the possibilities of fire beneath.

R. P. Burns stole away with Johnny and the Imp, without so much as letting his neighbours know of his intentions. He had made sure that they were all well; that no incipient scarlet fever or invading measles was threatening them. He smiled to himself as the car went past the Chester house, to think how interested they would be to know where he was going. But he got safely off and nobody opened a door at sound of the Imp to call to him to come in a minute because somebody seemed not quite well.

And then, after all, he ran upon Arthur Chester—and at the city station, to which he had taken the precaution to go, although the ten-thirty stopped for a half-minute at the village. It must be admitted that he tried to dodge his best friend, but he did not succeed. His shoulders were too conspicuous: he could not get away.

“Going to see an out-of-town patient at this hour of night?” queried Chester, coming up warmly interested, as best friends have a trick of being, in spite of all that can be done to avert their curiosity.